FLATLINING INTO THE FUTURE -- GOING FORWARD WITHOUT LEADERS IN THE SPIRIT OF THE CROWD

 FLATLINING INTO THE FUTURE – GOING FORWARD WITHOUT LEADERS IN THE SPIRIT OF THE CROWD

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 12, 2012

Some sixty years ago a longshoreman turned author, a man with little formal education but a passionate taste for the word, wrote “The True Believer” (1951).  The book was about mass movements and the fanatical spirit of the person compelled to join a cause, any cause, to quiet the collapsing boredom that imprisoned him in the mundane. 

Hoffer became something of a guru of the 1950s when Eric Sevareid on CBS TV interviewed him during prime time in 1963.  Hoffer wrote a series of books and became something of a celebrity, but nothing topped his first book, “The True Believer.”

What is a true believer? 

According to Hoffer, a true believer is a guilt-ridden hitchhiker who thumbs a ride on every cause from Christianity to Communism.  He is a fanatic not comfortable in his own skin, needing a Stalin or a Christ or a Hitler to worship and die for.  The true believer is a mortal enemy of things as they are, and thinks nothing of sacrificing himself for a dream or a hope or a cause that is impossible to define and more incomprehensible to attain.  He sees the true believer everywhere on the march from early Christianity to his era of the 1950s.  Self-educated as a philosopher, he clarifies in this work the motives and hatreds of the crowd, which has seething contempt for the individual who is uninspired by their holy cause.

Hoffer was the darling of the liberal movement of the time until he commenced to criticize African Americans for their indolent ways, and to defend President Lyndon Johnson and his policies during the Viet Nam War. 

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Society moves forward in mysterious ways, and sometimes that movement resembles a flat line when the oscillating rhythms of life creep forward with neither a blip up or down, positive or negative, resembling a static curve on the oscilloscope.  We are in such a moribund period now.

Hoffer’s focus was on true believers, but he used the motives and hatreds of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, and the love of the Christ to illustrate the latticework to which true believers clung to in their fanaticism.

Were the longshoreman to have been able to think outside the box, which Edward de Bono would not introduce as "lateral thinking" for another quarter century, he would have seen that society was breaking down at its core because there were no longer leaders, only managers, and the crowd was a symptom of this development.  Leaders guide people; managers manipulate people as things to be managed.

Leaders were no longer bigger than life villains like Hitler nor saviors like the Christ, only insensitive tyrants like Caligula in chief executive roles that managed companies and countries as if they were selling an inanimate product.  In this climate, profit was more important than people, as people were only a vehicle to the bottom line, and a necessary but cumbersome consideration to that focus; translated: expendable.

We read daily in the headlines of our newspapers, on our blogs and on television news of the current intransigence on Wall Street, in Congress, in Brussels in the European Economic Community, as the fabric of economic, political, social and cultural life of an increasingly global society is seen to be unraveling.  Yet, no leaders rise out of the trenches to right the situation, as polarity has become the name of the game, and puerile bickering the state of governance.

We see in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought. 

Two things are at work in this transformation.  Traditional religious, political, economic and social institutions are crumbling no longer able to support themselves much less those that look for them for guidance. 

The pyramid of hierarchical authority has collapsed and everyone including those who have the title of “leader” is scampering about with no clue as to what has happened much less where they are, as the chain-of-command is now only a chain around the neck of society slowing everyone’s progress. 

Indicative of this scurrying are the Republican Party debates for the Presidency of the United States.  They resemble Keystone Cop skits as they vie for the most powerful position in the world with no idea how to lead.  They personify the problem and the scope of its intrusive character on contemporary life, but they are not the problem.  Too much too many too soon has been the mantra of the day as we are on the cusp of an entirely new condition of existence and thought as the result of information technology and this exploding scientific age.

Our beliefs and values are tottering and disappearing, the pillars of society are giving way one by one, and into this vacuum has inevitably come the power of the crowd, the only force that nothing menaces and which has a momentum of its own.  It is mindless because a crowd is leaderless.  It coalesces around impressions in a tectonic shift of strangers who willingly sacrifice their identity and personality to a collective mind that can be as easily criminal as heroic.

Where this is going is difficult to say.  What is certain is that we are in the grip of the crowd where there is no room for the individual, and leadership is only possible from individual not collective consciousness. 

We fail to see this erosion in individualism because we fail to see 24/7 news coverage as an invasion of our privacy, neither do we see the constant polling of our collective mind by pundits and politicians, marketers and advertisers, political and social scientists, and other pollsters as such invasions, nor do we protest vociferously at 24/7 surveillance at seemingly every stop light, shopping mall, school, church or even our homes as a manifestation of this intrusive removal of our individualism.  We behave like puppets on a string with the puppet master a puppet as well.  Nobody is in charge.  Events control the day.

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